c. 600 BCE |
Phoenician explorers sail into the Atlantic and reach Britain |
c. 330 BCE |
Pytheas the Greek sails as far as Shetland and probably Iceland |
83 |
Agricola’s troops circumnavigate Britain |
c. 550 |
St Brendan and other Irish monks sail to Faroe and Iceland |
c. 780 |
‘Viking’ raids out of Scandinavia begin to attack the shores of Europe |
825 |
Dicuil writes his ‘Book of the Measure of the Earth’ |
874 |
Ingolf Arnarson, a Norwegian, settles Iceland |
986 |
Eirik the Red discovers ‘Greenland’ and settlers begin to arrive |
c. 1000 |
Leif Eiriksson (‘the Lucky’) finds North America |
1112 |
First Bishop of Greenland, Eirik Gnupsson, appointed |
1378 |
Plague years in Europe. Great Schism begins, dividing the Mediaeval Church |
1400 |
Norse settlement of Greenland starts to founder |
1517 |
Beginning of Reformation in Europe |
1553 |
Richard Chancellor finds the White Sea of Russia |
1578 |
Martin Frobisher ‘discovers’ Greenland and claims it for England |
1596 |
Willem Barents discovers Svalbard and names it ‘Spitzbergen’ |
1606 |
Henry Hudson reaches 80° 23′ north, renaming Spitzbergen ‘Newland’ |
1664 |
First ‘tourist’, Francesco Negri, reaches Lapland from Italy |
1681 |
Three Frenchmen led by J. F. Regnard include Lapland in their ‘Grand Tour’ |
1697 |
Publication of first ‘travel book’, Dampier’s New Voyage Round the World |
1736 |
Anders Celsius travels to Lapland to prove Newtonian science correct |
1898 |
Fridtjof Nansen returns to Lapland from an attempt on the North Pole |
1945 |
Many towns in Lapland destroyed by the retreating German army |
2000+ |
Tourism forms increasingly large part of modern economies all across Arctic Europe |